DARK AT NOON, AKA L’OEIL QUI MENT (THE EYE THAT LIES) is a bi-lingual Raoul Ruiz fable with John Hurt and David Warner keeping the British end up. Unfortunately, this was another sub-optimal Ruiz experience for me since my copy had no subtitles for the French bits. And I think the French bits may have contained a number of clues, at the very least, as to why what was happening was happening.

Nevertheless, it seemed that John Hurt, as the Marquis, wasn’t feeling too well, as his body had been invaded by a second John Hurt, a manufacturer of prosthetic limbs, and his young bride, who were attempting to create a child INSIDE the first John Hurt. The scenes of John Hurt possessed by a male consciousness down one side and a female down the other recall Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin in ALL OF ME. The mad science aspects suggest that a more profitable pairing might be with FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND, another film where John Hurt violates the creator’s laws (and a film which might have been well suited to Ruiz, since it has Mary Shelley and her fictional characters inhabiting the same film-universe, quite a Ruizian trope. All this and time travel too). Anyway, the pregnancy has peculiar side-effects for the Marquis:

Nasty. Are you taking something for that?

(Given that the only Chilean filmmakers I know are Alejandro Jodorowsky and Raoul Ruiz, I really wonder what else they’re getting up to in that distant land…)

The credits appear over luridly coloured shots of eels, which look like a scrambled cable porn channel viewed in a hotel room — fittingly enough, since the eels are what our hero (Didier Bourdon) sees when he looks at John Hurt’s sperm through a microscope. “There are three forces in the universe: elcectricty, gravity… and sexuality.”

Add in a plague of Virgins (apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary), rogue levitations and a boy whose unsanctioned miracles are wreaking havoc with the prosthetic limb industry, and we have a typically peculiar Ruiz brew. I liked the special effects, especially the luminous B.V.M.s and David Warner’s paintings, which exude fungoid conwebs that ensnare the unwary while subduing them with a powerful soporific perfume. Now if only I knew what the French characters were on about — it might help me understand what the English characters were on about.

Or it might not. For a while there, each Ruiz film I saw made more sense to me than the last. I can’t really say that with this and TREASURE ISLAND, but neither was an ideal case, T. ISLAND having been forcibly hacked down from four hours, and this one being only half-English and unsubtitled. I shall choose the next one with care…